Sapiens

I am sitting in my living room. I watch hot steam curl from my coffee mug into the dark. A sliver of pink glances against the horizon outside my window. 

A new dawn.

It always takes me a while to settle into a routine away from school. I am just so driven during the school year. Driven by my love of learning, by my perfectionism, by my desire to do EVERYTHING, by my students, by my colleagues. I just never stop. (Every day I'm hustlin').

But here I am, embracing the stillness of dawn.

Since break began six days ago I've been working my way through Noah Yuval Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. The book highlights so many of the complicated (and in many cases downright coincidental) origins of how and why we are the way we are as humans. 

One of the most stirring realizations I've had is that we aren't meant to be so overwhelmed. It's just not the way we were originally made. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, for example, actually didn't work all that much. The common misperception is that they spent all day, backs to the sun, gathering and hunting all in the effort to survive. Really, though, they were communal and differed from their neanderthal cousins because of their propensity for storytelling and imagining. Yet it was that very trait (imagination) that allowed them to become so complicated, to develop social hierarchies based upon social imaginaries, and to care deeply about invisible things like numbers.

And here I am, knocking on the door of the year 2018 C.E. This is the present tense of our history as humans, and out there somewhere my students are living their lives and loving the people around them. Sure, there are things that are stressing them out and things that are making them more busy than they'd like, but I hope--like me--they are finding time to sit and be still. Finding time to merely exist. Because many of us have the convenience and privilege to not have to worry about survival...we can take time to reflect and imagine and to turn off our devices and wait for something, anything (a drawing, a poem, a recipe, a game, a conversation, a cuddle with a pet, a walk in the cold) to draw us in and to serve as a catalyst for a new idea that's never existed.

Our lives are written in the present tense, but we make it so complicated. We've got these beautiful sapien brains that can create so much. Here are the two results of our human imagination that have inspired me most in the past week (this and this other one). It makes me think of the wonderful line penned by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations: 

“Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies—it happens when society adopts new behaviors.”

Here's to our collective potential as humankind. Let's slow down and let our imaginations run.

The things we build

Far too often, school exists as a fait accompli. A thing that has already happened or been decided before those affected hear about it, leaving them with no option but to accept it. 

Students complete assignments assigned by teachers.

But what else in life operates in this way? We get to respond and engage with nearly everything else that comes our way and the learning we undertake in life is so often self-directed and driven by our own interests and engagement. 

So it was with this in mind that I approached this week's assignments for my students. 

Today I shared with them an idea I've had to create a "Periodic Table of Religion." They're in the midst of learning about the Periodic Table of Elements in Science, so I figured I'd tap into their expertise and gauge what a religious table might look like.

They quickly taught me about the characteristics of the elemental table ("What is its function?" I asked.)

Okay, I thought. So, then, how could we apply the functionality of this table to one about religion? How could it be useful to us? They quickly got to work brainstorming the types of information that could be valuable in a Periodic Table of Religion.

See, this is the thing. My students had a better list of ideas than I ever could have developed on my own. I had the idea, but instead of framing it as an assignment (fait accompli), I allowed my students to play a role in the vision. I can't wait to see what they do with it.

I've been thinking about how my students apply their own learning to the world around them lately. I've been considering what types of jobs they might someday have and how the ways they think (and are allowed to think) in school are preparing them. As such, three of my current students and I are writing an article about buildings. We're looking at a current building project on our campus (a new dining hall) and asking, "How is building a dining hall like writing an 8th grade essay?"

We understand the steps in crafting an essay:

1. Process
1. Choose a topic
2. Research
3. Outline
4. Rough Draft
5. Edit
6. Proofread
7. Final Draft
8. Revise (Revised final draft → the “polishing” stage)
9. Publish

When buildings are finished, they represent a fait accompli. Yet, in How Buildings Learn, author Stewart Brand notes,

Papers are constantly building and rebuilding until...well...they aren't. But the interpretations continue. As we read (and re-read!) our favorite books, don't we glean new meaning? Aren't poems and plays and speeches crystalline, as Brand suggests buildings can be in their uses and function?

So, I wonder, as I close in on my 30 minutes of reflection, how our learning might be like this. My students learned about the Periodic Table of Elements from their Science teacher...but how does that apply to the rest of their lives? How does it change the way they think about order and organization? How can the measuring of stuff be shifted and tilted and applied to something totally divergent?

Even though some assignments feel static (like my students' vocabulary quiz tomorrow), their use of the words is fluid, crystalline.

Their learning exists simultaneously in the past, present, and future tenses of their lives' stories.

Perhaps, then, building isn't the right way to think about my students...I am not building them, nor are they building themselves.

Our dining hall and our essays will one day be finished (or...abandoned?) and sent out into the world to be used and appreciated. But my students are building something that is both built and grown. It is both innate and extrinsic.

Strong Humans

Over the past week, I've appreciated sitting alongside my students and supporting them in their writing of essays about Lord of the Flies. Only that's just the half of it. I've LOVED it. I've asked them questions both big and small (I wonder how the rhythm would change if you gave your reader a break in this paragraph; your conclusion is universal in its appeal, but why does this topic matter to you?), and I've taken the time to digest and explore the sharp, young voices beginning to emerge from each analysis.

But I've also been struck by the contemporary relevance of their topic choices. Each of them is dissecting Golding's novel through the lens of human nature. They're looking beneath the characters for symbols that are universally applicable. And they're thinking beautiful, brilliant thoughts. While some students are opting to focus on one philosophical belief (Hobbes, Aristotle, Locke, etc.), others are looking at feminism, and asking the question "Why did Golding choose to write the novel without any female characters?

They're asking HUGE questions, and taking big risks. They're discussing power, developing joke webs to both develop creative titles and embrace their inner adolescent (e.g. "No Mama, No Drama" or "Golding's Daughterless Doom" or "Hopeless Humanity"), and engaging in deliberative dialogue with one another.

And nobody has brought up TIME magazine's person of the year, or #MeToo, or the current state of "human nature" in Washington, DC, or Jerusalem, or the Levant, or anywhere else. And that's good. It's healthy. They're still kids. But what they're doing by engaging in these conversations is placing themselves steadfastly in the path of their future selves, their future consciences. They realize that,  even in the absence of women, Piggy and Simon were the two most caring, compassionate, logical, comforting (motherly) characters...and even they are killed. And, frankly, that breaks my students hearts.

Golding wrote a novel about boys and what boys do in groups. For a very long time the narrative about power and humankind has been about men, because they're the only ones in the room. But that's changing, and my students are ready. All of them--male and female--realize that Golding was really asking us to consider who will come to save us from our island.

Someday my students will be the powerful, the decision-makers, the leaders. And I trust that they will choose good and treat one another well.

Sure, they've reminded me that they are emerging as strong writers...but they have also reminded me that the future is in good hands...that they are emerging as strong humans as well.

Who Inspires Me? (a sequel)

"Will, I think you might be looking at inspiration too one-dimensionally. You are inspired by so many people...but it just isn't always packaged the same way--the way you might think."

That was my wife responding to my post from yesterday.*

And, as I sat on my living room couch, my mind began to drift toward all the people I interact with who inspire me.

They inspire me not because of their textbook, Eureka-like moments of garrulous, collective, firework-inducing INSPIRATION, necessarily, but rather because of their inspiring

humility,

willingness to listen (to understand, not to respond),

commitment to social justice,

love of their students,

simultaneous commitment to both discipline AND fun,

clear and direct channels of communication,

penchant for making eye contact,

playfulness, 

eagerness to become excited about the things that excite their students,

unabashed love of YA fiction,

Twitter feed,

positivity,

joy (even in the face of inopportune circumstances),

devotion to the mission of the school,

tendency to ask, "Can I give you some feedback I would want to hear if I were you?",

gentleness,

sense of humor,

eye contact,

love of change and challenge,

love of tradition,

curiosity,

organization,

penmanship,

desire to celebrate EVERYTHING worth celebrating.

So, thanks to them...they're worth celebrating for sure.

*And so is my spouse/partner/confidant/inspiration/friend who, nearly a decade ago, first caught my attention because she challenged me in a way nobody else ever had.